Galeon-AA HOWTO (xft version)

Ok folks, this was supposed to be soon after it was nuked originally, but that didn't happen :( Anyway, if you're interested in getting Galeon going with anti-aliased fonts and not using the (inferior IMHO) freetype method, read on!

Update: After talking a bit with tko on IRC (#galeon, irc.gnome.org), he threw me a sources.list line, which is at the top of the HOWTO now.

Update 2
The tko xft debs were updated last night so that the second part of the instructions are no longer valid. No more messing with fonts.conf, just install the debs!

Update 1
First, huge thanks to tko for making these available. Please note that they are a) i686 optimized, and b) built for him, by him, so if they're busted, don't bitch :)

Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://tko.wox.org/debian ./
They are mozilla .9.9-6 debs, so right up to date with the current ones. Second step is to download http://tko.wox.org/debian/fonts.conf and put it in /etc/mozilla

Restart, and all will be well! If you're still interested in building your own, read on boys and girls.

First of all, I'm sorry, I don't have the original HOWTO still available, so this is from scratch. Just so you know, the reason why I did this originally was because while the (now standard I think) method of getting antialiased text in galeon/mozilla was with libFreeType2, the XFT hack seems to work and look much much nicer, and requires only an environment variable or two to be set instead of having the user mess around with their prefs.js file.

First thing to do is grab mozilla with the XFT hack in it. This was originally here, but the RPMs were removed, and now there are just tarballs (which work just fine). However, if you want the rest, with the -devel, -psm, etc files, you can grab them from the local mirror.

Ok, so you've got the files, now install them. If you're an RPM user, use alien to convert the .debs to .rpm, or .tgz, or really, whatever you want. A cool way of doing this is:
# for i in mozilla*.deb ; do alien -r $i ; done

(That'll convert all the .debs to .rpms in one command.... $DEITY bless bash!).

Step 2: grab the latest galeon:
# cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co -r galeon-1-2 galeon

(that will grab the galeon 1.2 branch from the gnome cvs tree).

Step 3, compile.
# cd galeon
# ./autogen.sh && make && make install


If you've installed mozilla in a non-standard place, you'll have to pass that information to galeon via the ./autogen.sh script. When compiling is done, set the following environment variables in the method that is appropriate to your shell (modify paths if needed).
# export FONTCONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/mozilla/res/Xft/
# export MOZILLA_XFT=1

Then run, and admire the great look: example 1 and example 2.

That's about it... now, the last time I did this was a while, back so I don't know if it'll work anymore. I've emailed the maintainer of the XFT hack, and asked if there's any more development on it, so who knows.

Please let me know of any errors in here so that I can fix them. I've just finished building it using mostly exactly what I used here, but who knows right? :)

Posted by Arcterex at April 18, 2002 10:41 PM